This revised R01 application from a geographically-dispersed team of researchers has the goal of providing evidence of the effectiveness of strategies to protect home health care workers from violence, as measured through a prospective study of rates of verbal and physical assaults. The stated long-range goal is to increase the implementation of comprehensive security programs into home health agencies to reduce violent events and their consequences on home health care providers. The major hypothesis is that workers within agencies that exhibit a profile of high compliance with the "Guidelines for Preventing Workplace Violence for Health Care and Social Service Workers" will have lower rates of assaults than workers within agencies with lesser commitment to following these guidelines. The study will provide risk information that can later be used to develop evidence-based prevention programs that would help guide home health agencies toward intervention strategies that are most likely to work to lower incidence rates in these relatively uncontrolled settings. The project's aims are: (1) to determine the incidence of workplace verbal and physical assaults; (2) identify risks for verbal and physical assaults based on characteristics of the agency, provider, patient, and external environment; (3) identify which of the OSHA-recommended guidelines are present within each agency; and (4) identify the effectiveness of agency-level policies and prevention efforts on the incidence of verbal and physical assaults. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]